Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Worst. Cannibal Movie. Ever. At least of the ones I’ve seen and to be honest with you I’m no Cannibal Movie expert since I’ve only seen four or five of them but Good Lord were those four or five Cannibal Movies better than this slow moving dreck ‘The Mountain of the Cannibal God’.

Susan Stevenson as played by the Sensuous Nurse herself, Ursula Andress, has just arrived in New Guinea to find her missing husband. We are informed via one of those text placards that New Guinea is one of the last bastions of explored wilderness on the planet earth. Susan and her terminally pissed off brother Arthur (Antonio Marsina) want to know what the British Consulate and the New Guinea government are doing to retrieve her husband, a scientist who went missing while on a deep jungle expedition. The government informs Susan and Arthur that they aren’t doing a damn thing and that her stupid ass husband pretty much has gotten what he deserved. I’m paraphrasing there.

Fortunately Arthur is associated with famed anthropologist Dr. Edward Foster (Stacy Keach) who knows this stupid husband of Susan’s and also knows the deadly fauna of the area. It will be a difficult journey to the mountain of Raka Raka, but Dr. Foster is ready, he has his good man Friday by his side, Susan looks disinterested which just happens to be Ursula Andress’ acting style, and Arthur is pissed off. Off they go!

Right of the bat things are looking bad because Susan falls down in the forest for the first of about a thousand times and comes face to face with a spider. Edward kills the spider which the four or five natives he’s brought along take as a bad omen. To counteract this omen and bless them with safety the natives engage in ritual that involves a captured lizard which they gut and eat alive. Note that in the next ten or so minutes all these natives will die horribly thus making that ritual the most worthless ritual ever. It is a little odd that the natives who know this jungle like the back of their hand are all dead but the white people are still alive and kicking.

The next thirty five or forty minutes of this movie consist of watching Edward, Arthur and Susan walk in the woods, bicker and ride in rafts. Two things haven’t happened yet in this movie that I was certain were going to happen real quick with one being the complete absence of cannibals to this point and two being Ursula Andress hasn’t gotten naked yet. What’s up with that? Eventually our team makes it to the camp of some missionary and finally stuff starts to happen. Arthur gets to make out with a native girl, Ursula Andress takes her shirt off, Edward starts to trip about the Pooka tribe that made him eat people back in the day, they pick up another white man to go on the journey in Dr. Manolo (Claudio Cassinelli), and they are finally attacked by a wayward cannibal.

Then it gets real dull again as we are forced to watch a new set of people walk in the woods, ride in rafts and climb on rocks. Eventually they get to the cannibals, they find the missing husband, we learn that there was some okey-doke involved in this search from the start and then we watch a grown man try to make sweet love to a pig. What the hell?

I imagine one of the things that was a little odd about ‘Mountain of the Cannibal God’ was the inclusion of Stacy Keach and Ursula Andress among the cast. Not that either of these two actors are above this kind of thing but they aren’t what I’m used to seeing in a cannibal flick. Their presence didn’t help all that much because we could’ve been watching Marlon Brando and Katherine Hepburn walk in the woods for forty minutes and it still would’ve been incredibly boring. Now every once in a while director Sergio Martino would show us some animal eating or regurgitating another animal, just like we saw in those other cannibal movies but those other cannibal movies had tension, drama and other shocking stuff to work with and didn’t rest its shock value on a monkey’s head resting in the mouth of a snake.

When we finally get to the cannibal mayhem it certainly couldn’t get any duller than it already was, but it was still dull and disconnected. There was just a series of semi-disconnected scenes, again mostly stuck in for shock value such as watching the dude try to screw the pig, watching some guy getting his dick sawed off by a jagged stick or watching some dirty cannibal chick play with herself. Just so you know the guy who got his dick sawed off received this as punishment for trying to have sex with Susan, but the guy who tried to screw the pig received no such recrimination. That’s some inequitable stuff right there.

Admittedly those other Cannibal flicks weren’t works of art by any means but they did have enough filmmaking ability behind them to at least keep you interested. ‘Mountain of the Cannibal God’, which did have much higher production values than the other Cannibal flicks I’ve seen, still found a way to be boring with better actors than those other cannibal flicks, some of the hotter cannibal chicks than in all of those other cannibal movies combined, a cannibal midget, and a guy trying to screw a pig. How do these tragedies occur?